Distributed Thinking

In EA, architecture principles set a framework for making architectural decisions.  They help to establish a common understanding across different groups of stakeholders, and provide guidance for portfolios and projects.  Michael Durso of the LSE gave a good introduction to the idea in a webinar last week for the UCISA EA community. Many organisations take the TOGAF architecture principles as a starting point.  These are based on the four architectural domains of TOGAF: business, information/data, applications, technology/infrastructure.  These principles tend to describe what should be done, e.g. re-use applications, buy in software rather than build it, keep data secure.  See for example the principles adopted at Plymouth University and the University of Birmingham . Recently though, I encountered a different way of looking at principles.  The user experience design community tend to focus more on how we should do things.  E.g. we should...

According to this article in Scientific American , there is a fair bit of psychological research into how we find meaning and happiness in our lives.  The two are often correlated; feeling that our lives have meaning helps to make us happy, although sometimes short-term happiness has to take back seat to longer term personal development.&nbsp Purpose is one key aspect of meaning.  It is not surprising that people feel greater satisfaction when they feel their lives have purpose, and that much of the literature on business leadership talks about motivating people by giving them a clear sense of purpose.  The classic (and possibly apocryphal) story is that of the NASA cleaner who, when asked what his job was for, replied that he was helping to send a man to walk on the moon. My academic friends tend to have a clear sense of purpose for much of their work.  They see their students learn.  They see their research grow, one paper at a time.  In the suppo...

As I noted in October , my rate of blogging has dropped noticeably, from 34 posts in 2016 to a mere 7 last year.  I don't really adopt new year's resolutions but as a goal for this year, I would like to wrote more posts.  I like to keep this blog both as a means for letting colleagues know what we're working on, and as an area of reflection for myself. The two main obstacles to writing more stem from the same source: the University has a large number of initiatives under way and we are trying to support them with a architecture team of just three people.  So on the one hand, we have a lot of other demands on our time aside from writing for this blog, while on the the other hand the initatives are large and ongoing, which makes them hard to summarise in succinct posts.  Yet to make our architecture work yield its best effect, we have to write, and talk, and communicate widely.  And, to be fair, we do this: via board reports, presentations, one-to-one meetings...

The annual EDUCAUSE conference attracted 8,000 people to the Philadelphia convention centre, including four of us from the University of Edinburgh.  My colleagues were giving presentations, while my main reason for attending was the pre-conference workshop on Enterprise Architecture and Digital Transformation, which I blogged about last week. The conference itself offered a smorgasbord of options.  I mainly attended sessions about new technologies, which I blogged about on the Applications Directorate blog, and a few others which consolidated my existing interests.  If these topics weren't to your taste, there were also sessions about research, learning technologies, enterprise systems, leadership development, equality and diversity, and many other aspects of IT in higher education. The exhibit hall gave opportunities to talk to many vendors, from the large established corporations to the newcomers in "startup alley". I chatted to several CRM vendors, and looked at o...

Yesterday I attended a rather good workshop on the topic of enterprise architecture and digital transformation, which was organised by the architecture group of EDUCAUSE , the American society for IT in higher education. This topic is of obvious interest to me because we are running several digital transformation initiatives at the University of Edinburgh.   The workshop was a good opportunity for the participants to learn what other universities are doing and to reflect on how we, as architects, can position our work to help these initiatives succeed. The presenters didn’t let us sit back and relax; there was a lot of group work and few presentations.   We began by compiling a list of the external factors driving digital transformation, both technical and cultural.   We produced a long list!   Then we divided into groups, each of which chose one value chain which would be affected – e.g. recruitment of international students – and discussed the drivers and...

I notice that in 2016 I wrote 34 posts on this blog.  This is only my fifth post in 2017 and we're already three-quarters of the way through the year.  Either I've suddenly got lazier, or else I've had less time to spend writing here.  As I'm not inclined to think of myself as especially lazy, I'm plumping for the latter explanation. There really is a lot going on.  The University has several major initiatives under way, many of which need input from the Enterprise Architecture section. The Service Excellence programme is overhauling (the buzzword is "transforming") our administrative processes for HR, Finance, and Student Administration.  Linked to this is a programme to procure an integrated ERP system to replace the adminstrative IT systems.  Enabling Digital Transformation is a programme to put the middleware and architecture in place so that we can make our processes "digital first".  We're implementing an API framework , a noti...

One of my goals since starting this job two years ago has always been to create a repository for architecture documents.  The idea is to have a central store where people can find information about the University's applications, data sources, business processes, and other architectural information.  This store will make it easier for us to explain our plans, to show the current state of the University's information systems, and to explain what Enterprise Architecture is all about. It's taken a long time to reach this goal, mainly because we're often had more pressing and immediate work to be done.  The creation of a repository is one of those tasks that is very important but never quite urgent.  So I'm now very happy to say that we are in the process of deploying a repository and modelling tool. This is the culmination of a careful process to select the most appropriate tool for our needs.  We began by organising several workshops to gather requirements f...

Last week, Allister Homes from the University of Lincoln gave a presentation to the UCISA EA group about how Lincoln have set up their Enterprise Architecture practice and where they are now in using Enterprise Architecture. The presentation is online and you can see it here: Enterprise Architecture at Lincoln Do take a look.  I found Allister's talk both interesting and reassuring.  Lincoln's EA practice is 12-18 months older than ours, and as a result it is a bit more embedded into university culture and processes than us, as one might expect. But we're on a similar path and not too far behind.  EA seems to be delivering good results at Lincoln, which bodes well for us. Both practices are based in our IT departments and are reaching out to the business areas.  We are working with similar principles (because we both used the same set of TOGAF principles as our starting point).  Lincoln have an established design authority which reviews all projects; w...

This is a useful introduction to the role of Enterprise Architecture in Universities: Manage Today's IT Complexities with an Enterprise Architecture Practice EDUCAUSE is the North American organisation for IT in Higher Education, filling roughly the same role as UCISA in the UK.  For the UK, I would add the UCISA EA Community of Practice to the "knowledge base", rather than the North American ITANA group. The section in the article about formulating an EA practice strategy is highly relevant.  We started with a completely bottom-up approach and it quickly transpired that we didn't have the time or resources to produce the results we wanted.  Now we are sort of half-way between the two: we have top-down support within Information Services Group, and are reaching out in a bottom-up way to the rest of the University. It's an interesting article and not too long. Take a look!

Many people in the University support the idea of making resources open for anyone to use, and some trailblazers have set up the Open Knowledge Network to help support this notion.  One aspect of this is open data and with the Edinburgh Cityscope project developing nicely, it would be timely to put support for open data on a firmer basis.  In this post, I consider some implications and prerequisites for publishing University data. Suppose someone wanted to make some data available as open data.  What would they need to consider? Well, first of all, who owns the data, and who is responsible for it?  If it is the University’s data, whose permission do they need?  To answer this, we have agreed policy to assign data stewards to the University’s main enterprise data sets.  These data stewards will be responsible for making data available to people who need it, and ensuring that restricted data (such as personal information) is protected....

So much has happened over the last year with our Enterprise Architecture practice that it's hard to write a succinct summary.  For my day-to-day experience as enterprise architect, the biggest change is that I now have a team to work with.  This time last year, I was in the middle of a 12-month secondment to create the EA practice, working mainly on my own.  Now my post has been made permanent and I have recruited two members of staff to help meet the University's architectural needs. I have spent a lot of the year meeting people, listening to their concerns and explaining how architecture can help them.  This communication remains vital, the absolute core of what we do and we will continue to meet people in this way.  We also talk to people in other Universities in order to learn from what they are doing and to share our own experience back.  A highlight in this regard was my trip to the USA last January. Our biggest deliverable for the past year was...

Last week, we were delighted to receive a visit from Rupert Frankum of Plymouth University.  Rupert was the technical manager for Plymouth's project to replace their old student recruitment and admissions processes with a modern system based on a CRM platform  You can see a shorter presentation that Rupert and his colleague Paul Westmore gave at this year's UCISA conference on the conference website. Rupert gave an excellent talk, covering many aspects of their project.  For me, the highlight was the discussion of their CRM vision, which used an analogy of a Rubik's cube to give an image of how common technical components can support different parts of the recruitment process.  This explained the issues, and how they can be addressed, in an engaging and effective way. This visit was timely for us. We have been building a business case for a CRM platform for several months, and the University is currently reviewing how we manage (or fail to manage) student recrui...

I'm delighted to welcome Jason Murphy, who joins us as our CRM Architect, and Wilbert Kraan, our new Data Architect.  Both Jason and Wilbert have worked as consultants for several years and bring new skills and considerable experience to IS.  They both know more than I do about their respective fields, which is how I like to hire people. So the Enterprise Architecture practice now comprises the three of us, instead of me working on my won, which means we have more capacty to guide the University's IT architecture.  We can offer a greater range of skills and can bring a wider range of experience to bear.  I'm really excited about the opportunities this presents. As his job title implies, Jason will focus on contact relationship management, working to build a user community and to create a strategy for managing and improving the University's relationships with prospective students, research partners, community organisations, and other parties - to give them all a b...

Last Friday I gave a guest lecture to third-year Informatics students on the Software Design and Modelling course. Professor Stevens, who leads the course, asked me to repeat the presentation that I gave last month to an audience of University staff.  She thought that many of the issues I covered would be relevant to the course, and the topic of improving the online student experience was clearly one that the students could relate to.  It's a long time since I did my own degree but unless times have changed markedly, I suspect that students don't often get to see the issues around integrating many pre-existing systems, rather than building small systems in the lab. I enjoyed the session.  I don't often get to meet students, so this was a refreshing experience, and we had a good discussion following the presentation. As expected, they confirmed that the online experience currently provided by University systems is "all over the place". One of the questions ...

Despite its "Trump" headline, this article from the Harvard Business Review is a good guide on how to encourage someone to change their mind about something. The suggestions would be useful for all sorts of arguments - whether Trump or Clinton now, or closer to home the Brexit controversy or more mundanely for issues in any office or workplace. Calling people names, pretty obviously, doesn't work. It may vent our frustration, or reaffirm our affinity to our group, or even stake a moral claim (e.g. calling someone a bigot is also claiming that we're better than them); what it won't do is get the victim of the name-calling to change their mind . f anything, it will strengthen their resolve. Arguing through logic sounds more reasonable, but often doesn't work. This is partly because people don't work 100% on logic, and partly because a debate becomes a contest in which we want to win (and, possibly, be seen to win). Losing a contest isn...

A common approach to explaining the benefits of Enterprise Architecture is to draw two diagrams: one that shows a complicated mess of interconnections, and one that shows a nicely layered set of blocks. Something like this one, which came from some consultants: I've never felt entirely happy with this approach.  Yes, we do want to remove as much of the needless complexity and ad-hoc design that litters the existing architecture.  Yes, we do want to simplify the architecture and make it more consistent and intelligible.  But the simplicity of the block diagram shown here is unobtainable in the vast majority of real enterprises.  We have a mixture of in-house development and different third-party systems, some hosted in-house, some on cloud infrastructure and some accessed as software-as-a-service.  For all the talk of standards, vendors use different authentication systems, different integration systems, and different user interfaces. So the simple block ...

This is a presentation I gave to an audience of University staff:  In this seminar, I invite you to consider what the University’s online services would be like, if we worked together to design them from the perspective of the student or member of staff who will use them, instead of designing them around the organisational units that provide them. I’ll start with how the services might appear to that student or member of staff, then work back from there to show what this implies for how we work, how we manage our data, and how we integrate our IT systems. It might even lead to changes in our organisational structure. Our online services make a vital and valued contribution to the work of our students and staff. I argue that with better integration, more consistent user interfaces, and shared data, this contribution could be significantly enhanced. This practice is called “Enterprise Architecture”. I’ll describe how it consults multiple organisational units and defines a fr...

I've started to evaluate the potential of using the Archimate modelling language for our architecture practice.  As architecture is primarily about communicating ideas, I didn't want to just start using this in my team and leaving everyone else mystified by the strange diagrams we started to produce.  Also, I wanted to judge how best to use the language.  So we arranged training for people from different teams and with different roles, partly to share the knowledge and partly to evaluate which aspects of the language (if any) would suit each teams. Archimate can represent many aspects of a system, starting with the motivations, drivers and stakeholders; moving to map business services and processes; then the applications that provide those services, and finally the infrastructure on which they run. You rarely display all aspects at once; instead there are a host of views that present particular aspects of the system.  The diagram above is taken from a JISC worksh...

I am preparing a business case to justify the building of a data warehouse for the University.  This has some challenges.  While everyone acknowledges that our current BI reports need improved, it is far from obvious how to measure the benefits of improving our BI.  Suppose we our student satisfaction score increases in two year's time: how much of that would be due to which specific initiatives, and which of those would result from decisions made with better BI data?  It's a tenuous thread of causality. Nonetheless, if we believe that the decisions made by staff have some impact on outcomes, and that by having better information available to them they will make better decisions, it follows that a successful data warehouse project will have a positive effect.  Even if the impact on University income is one tenth of one percent across the board, that would quickly repay the cost of developing and running the service. Another approach is to look at the costs o...

We were fortunate to have a visit from Neil Randall of Southampton Solent University last month.  Neil and his colleague Paul Colbran gave an excellent presentation at this year’s UCISA conference about their experience of setting up an effective BI service.  I invited Neil to visit Edinburgh to explain their approach to our team and to review our proposed BI architecture. We began the day with Neil reprising his part of the UCISA presentation and discussing several points arising.  We presented our draft architecture, and then we discussed topics including how to structure and manage a BI service, which ETL tools to use, how best to model data, and how to integrate a data warehouse with relationship management (CRM) software.  We had a very information conversation about “Extract, Transform, Load” (ETL) tools, which load data from source systems into a data warehouse.  Neil recommended we look at file-based tools rather than database-oriented tools.  Wit...